My President is Black

Writing about web page http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/20/obama-shelby-steele-oped-cx_pr_1121robinson.html

On a trip to Washington and Philadelphia, it seems like everywhere there are Obama T-shirts on sale. Sometimes it's Obama on the front, sometimes with his smiling family, and often they are all wrapped up in the Stars and Stripes. Captions: "My Commander in Chief." And "My President is Black." I liked that one so much, I tried to get it for my wife, but they didn't have her size. I wondered why I wasn't trying to get one for myself, but they so much more didn't have my size, and anyway I thought the sequins wouldn't suit me.

Out on the street some black kids had set up a stall and were noisily telling a small audience not to fall for the Obama illusion. I looked at a placard and saw something about the lost tribes of Israel. I didn't read too closely because it seemed like a bad place to linger. A colleague wondered if they knew Al-Qaeda was trying to put the same message across. There must be hope -- Christians and Muslims coming together before Christmas!

Later, I read "An interview with Shelby Steele." Steele, like Obama, has a mixed racial heritage, but he resents Obama's victory. He rejects the proposition that Obama was a post-racial candidate. (It's a fact: I Googled "Obama" and "post-racial" and got 528,000 hits in 0.19 seconds.) Steele says white folks voted for Obama to prove they were not racist, and black folks voted for him to prove they were not inferior to whites. So, he says, Obama got elected because he is black.

I agree Obama is not "post-racial," whatever that means. The polls show clearly that black voters favoured him more than white voters. Still, Obama got a lot of white votes. The TV pictures showed clearly that a huge number of people around the world, black and white, are inspired that "My President is Black" -- even if for many Obama is not, strictly, their president. In fact, I am one of them. I think it's inspiring that Americans have elected Obama. But to claim that Obama was elected because he is black seems to me to have a firm grip on a seriously wrong end of the stick.

Let's think:

• Would the voters have put in anyone who was black? I don't think so.
• If Jesse Jackson had been the Democratic candidate, would he have won? Surely not.
• Politics aside, did Obama have to demonstrate a lot more competence and leadership than McCain to win? Probably. 

So, Obama was not elected just because he is black. Being black was not enough. Most likely, being as good as the white guy was not enough either. That's the down side: Obama had to be twice as good as the white guy to win. But there's an upside, too: being black did not stop him winning! So, my conclusion is: there's a double bonus in this. Good for Obama, and good for America!

All Obama has to do now is govern America and lead the free world for four years without messing up in a context of financial and environmental meltdowns, a military quagmire in the Middle East, America's global unpopularity, and an undefeated terrorist threat ... And, if he can do that, he can be reelected and get to do it again!

One more reason to be hopeful of America: The cab driver from my hotel to the Union station in Washington DC was talking on his cellphone in a language I could not begin to recognise. When he finished, I asked where he came from. "Afghanistan, seven years ago," he said. I asked how he liked it here. "You know," he said, "I feel at home. This is my country now."

I told the driver he was lucky not to have sought refuge in England; seven years on, he would be living miserably in the British equivalent of a refugee camp in Peshawar, and complete strangers would call him a Paki. That set him off in another direction, saying that Peshawar belonged to Afghanistan until the conniving British gave it to Pakistan. Later, I looked this up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshawar and the story does seem a little complicated, but it notes that "to this day many Afghans claim large swathes of Pakistani territory, including the bustling frontier cities of Peshawar and Quetta, rightfully belong to Afghanistan."

My driver said he was reading The Kite Runner, so in his honour and in honour of America I bought it at the next bookstore to read myself. At my conference in Philadelphia I told this story to an old friend. He told me he'd refused to read The Kite Runner, although his wife had read it, because the small midwestern college town where they live had adopted it under the slogan "One Town -- One Book!" Isn't that called totalitarianism? I asked. He smiled uneasily and changed the subject.

Mark Harrison : 23 Nov 2008 05:27 |  Tags: Cab-Drivers Obama Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Child Protection: They're missing something, but what is it?

Writing about web page http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/nov/15/baby-p-child-abuse

The Guardian’s front page, Saturday Nov. 15, reported “Eight in 10 seriously harmed children ‘missed’ by agencies. Government research reveals scale of gaps in child protection.” The reporter, Robert Booth, noted that our child protection register lists 29,200 children “known to be suffering harm”. But, of the “189 children whose death or serious injury prompted a local authority serious case review between 2005 and 2007,” no less than 156 were not on the register, according to an analysis of the most serious cases that ministers will receive in the New Year. Conclusion: “The research has raised concerns that, across the country, procedures that should result in children at risk being protected by the government’s flagship anti-child abuse system are not being followed, leading to deaths that could be avoided.”

Sounds bad for social workers, doesn’t it? And yes, it’s a possible conclusion. But it is not the only evaluation we could make. I’ll show that a completely different conclusion is also possible. The point is that, in order to evaluate social work intervention we have to look at what they did do, as well as what they didn’t do. And evaluating what they did do turns out to be surprisingly difficult, because it involves asking the question: “What would have happened in the absence of any social work intervention?”

The report states that, over the three years from 2005 to 2007, 33 of the 29,200 children registered as “known to be suffering harm” were killed or seriously injured—a rate of approximately 1 per 1,000. What would have happened to these children if social workers had not registered them and watched their welfare? There’s a clue: it lies in the 156 children killed or injured that were not registered. It is not completely clear what this means, however, in so far as we don’t appear to know the size of the total pool of children suffering harm that were never spotted in advance and so never registered.

Here are two possibilities.

• First, suppose the number at risk but unregistered was quite small, say, one tenth of those registered. In that case, the rate of death or injury among the unregistered children suffering harm must have been very high—156 divided by 2,920, or 54 per thousand. Apply this rate to all the children hypothetically suffering harm then, the 29,200 registered plus the 2,920 unregistered. That suggests, conditional on no social work intervention, more than 1,700 casualties. But in actual fact, there were “only” 189. On this scenario, by registering nearly all children at risk, our social workers reduced casualties by an order of magnitude; they deserve congratulations, not brickbats, for the successful protection of thousands of children.

• Alternatively, suppose the number at risk but unregistered was much larger, say, as many as the total number registered. In that case the rate of death or injury among the unregistered children at risk was much lower—156 divided by 29,200, or 5.4 per thousand. This time, applying 5.4 per thousand to all the 29,200×2 children hypothetically suffering harm, it appears that, without any social work intervention, there would have been some 315 casualties. In this scenario social work intervention would appear to be less effective. Social workers missed half the children at risk, and their efforts did not even halve the casualties. In their defence, however, a further point would then need to be made. This is that, with nearly 60,000 children suffering harm, and half of them undetected and entirely lacking the protection they need, abuse must be far more widespread in our country than has been assumed in resourcing our hard pressed family services. While there is less in this scenario for which social workers should be praised, the main lesson would be that society is in much worse shape than we thought, and criticism for not recognising this should be reserved for ministers and policy advisers.

Two possibilities; which is it? I’ve never worked in or on child protection (I’m just a parent). Like you, I rely on the experts to tell me. But if the experts don’t ask, we’ll stay in ignorance.

Mark Harrison : 16 Nov 2008 11:48 |  Tags: Social-Work Using-Data |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem